The Dreaded Paper...

I am beginning to follow up on the outline of my final paper that I put together on Tuesday.  It is hard to put in to words exactly what my process has been for this Interim. I have watched several films, read the majority of a book on race relations in the South, and researched these films-- searching through page after page of google and Pascal articles looking for insights into the critical reception of theses movies within both racial communities. I have come to realize that my Interim has been much more about personal opinion and perspective on the quality of these films and their depiction of race relations than about the perspective of others. I have found a few gems, including interviews with several of the films' directors, and a number of good reviews from newspapers and magazines during the time of these films' release.  But as much as I can talk about the ins and outs of research, I think the coolest part of this Interim for me has been the gradual build up of comparison between all of these films. In a sense there is a pattern of plot, characterization, and even response to these films' audacious attempts to portray race relations in the American South-- let alone make a social commentary on the underachievement in civil rights progress at the time. I have enjoyed framing that together as the films have progressed.

Although I both applauded and criticized Black Like Me for its blunt depiction of John Howard Griffith's trip through the southern African-American's world in 1960, I find one of the film's major conflicts following me throughout my research. While I have enjoyed other films more and contemplated the commentaries and plot idiosyncrasies with greater interest, I find that Black Like Me represents a certain parallel to my work. Like John Howard Griffith, I feel like I am an outsider trying to understand a volatile and controversial world. The world I'm exploring is past, some 40 years and more, but at the same time it is very much alive in the world that I see. I have found myself overwhelmed with emotion about some of the injustice of the criticism raised over these films-- though not as much over the actual injustice of race relations (ironic, no?) Subjectivity and emotion has found its way into my attempts at objectivity in my writing, the same way that Griffith could not help but be enraged at what he saw from the perspective of a black man. Did he ever really get at what it felt like to be oppressed? Maybe. I am only viewing things from the other side of a TV screen in 2011, and I know that I am simply a tourist looking at Hollywood's attempt to piece together some of the wounds and scars and bandages of race relations, but it has affected me. There are so many layers to these films, from race to sexuality to justice to morality to politics. This paper is dreaded only in the sense that there is so much to say...

Thoughts on L.B.

I spent much of today outlining my end of term paper and presentation that will be due next week. I am excited about the presentation, as I think I have made an intriguing, if not entirely pertinent to my guiding question, revelation. When considering the protagonists, villains, and different characters of the films, a pattern emerged within several of them that I think will surprise people. Maybe. But I will leave the details for the actual presentation. I don't want to spoil it for my readers (Dr. Revels, Mom). 

I have felt a sense of satisfaction and yet found a challenge in contemplating the Liberation of L.B. Jones. I feel that I found a film that represents the confluence of many rivers-- that is, all the elements of race relations and the brutality of the era in which the film was made are depicted on screen. I was furthermore pleased when researching today; I found several articles, including a very insightful appraisal of the film's place in black cinema.

This film was made at a crossroads. Hollywood was transitioning out of a period of relatively mild civil rights films and into an era where Blaxploitation films such as Superfly and Shaft would define black cinema. L.B. Jones is classified as a Blaxploitation film, and as such, it is remarkable that Director William Wyler, considered during the mid-20th century to be, perhaps, one of the greatest American directors, would choose race as a topic for his last films. The response to this film was remarkable. More so than I realized yesterday, some critics hailed it as the most controversial and articulate film of its time; others wrote it off as an exploitative mess.  I found this very revelatory excerpt from British film magazine Sight and Sound. 

Sight and Sound Magazine:   "In some ways, the film’s most original aspect is its structure. Wyler sets up genre expectations of the liberal Hollywood movie that he then ruthlessly dismantles. Far from revealing a warm humanity under the gruff exterior, Lee J. Cobb’s lawyer becomes more deeply compromised and contemptible in his selective morality. Lee Majors’ young lawyer, seemingly a character likely to rectify wrongs, walks out of the situation with righteous but impotent anger. L.B. Jones refuses to run and his courage leads directly to his brutal murder. A black youth (Yaphet Kotto) who renounces violence midway through the film returns at the end to exact a vengeance more sadistic than the one originally planned.

In his last interview before his death, Wyler told his daughter Catherine that he had aimed the film at a white audience who he hoped would be embarrassed and enraged by what he depicted. Perhaps he succeeded too well. In the immortal phrase of Wyler’s former employer Sam Goldwyn, the public stayed away in droves. Its picture of a conflicted America might have struck too many raw nerves in a country still reeling over the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, a divisive war in Vietnam – and the departure from the White House of another LBJ.

The film seemed then to fall off the critical map, being displaced by black American filmmakers with their own visions of the black experience. To the best of my recollection, it has not been shown on terrestrial television here for over 20 years and has yet to be given a proper DVD release."

I think this gets at the heart of this film' significance as a movie lost in the shuffle. Edgy but non-commercial, it arrived at a time when it was too late for the Civil Rights Film to make an impact, and while it would have been one of the first Blaxploitation films, the film was not truly a Blaxploitation work: it sought to expose injustice and suggested uncompromising and even shocking responses without subtle undertones. Contrary to Sight and Sound's opinion, while I agree that Americans were occupied with Vietnam and transitioning out of such a volatile decade, I don't think the era hindered the film's success. I think it was the film's brutality and honesty. Many would still consider the content and violent retribution for equally violent prejudice as controversial. 

Lastly, I want to comment on the assessment of characters. This film is never wrapped in a bow. Courage is rewarded with brutal death. Those who make the right decision subsequently make bad decisions and, often, violent ones. The characters act as human beings: impulsively and with selfish motives. They don't act like players in a full circle drama; although, as the train pulls out of town in the final scene, I could not help but feel like resolution is achieved because of the jarring brutality and honesty. Courage is often not rewarded, though this film should be.

This and that...

             Before I get to my discussion of the Liberation of L.B. Jones, Dr. Revels posed a few questions that I think I should discuss regarding White Trash. It is a movie with more titles than viewers. The film is known as La Joven, The Young One, and White Trash. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, and it is filmed entirely in English without subtitles. The film is based on the story Travelin Man, by Peter Mathiesen. From what I can tell, this is an obscure art house film; however, everyone who has seen it, essentially, thinks it to be a fantastic film. It has a %100 rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with only 8 reviews). The South Carolina setting seems more convenient than anything. This film convinces the audience of the genuine hatred that the white men have for Traver, but there are no convincing accents and the setting seems less South Carolina and more California at some moments. Italian director Bunuel filmed and released the movie in Mexico, although it made its way to the United States. As best I can understand why this film did not make more of a public impact, I am convinced that the subject matter and the less than famous cast made it a non-commercial appeal. Sex and race were not mainstream in 1960. However, I think the film's economy of dialogue and the fact that Bunuel was a foreign director, one who made only two English language films, had as much to do with its obscurity as its controversial subject matter. Another Bunuel quote:

"One of the problems with The Young One was its anti-Manichean stance, which was an anomaly at the time, although today it's all the rage . . . Once upon a time, the movies reflected the prevailing morality very closely; there were the good guys and the bad guys, and there was no question of which was which. The Young One tried to turn the old stereotypes inside out; the black man in the movie was both good and bad, as was the white man."

How wonderful! A discussion, if not confirmation, of some of my insights. For Bunuel, this concept of plot diverging from the prevalent and accepted morality of an era (1960) makes this film a problem.  The complex issues of good and evil and the layers of character development with protagonist, antagonist, antihero, and villain simply may have made this movie ahead of its time. I am confident that there was no reaction to this film within the African-American community because few African-Americans saw this film in 1960. And fewer still may have seen it to date. Thank you Luis Bunuel for giving me something to work with.

And now for the Liberation of L.B. Jones. Like Black Like Me, I feel this is a film where the social commentary interferes with the plot. In order to relate a message, characters and storyline are clouded by intentions. I found this Variety Magazine review from 1970 to be humorous in its brevity:

"This story of a glossed-over Negro's murder by a Dixie policeman is, unfortunately, not much more than an interracial sexploitation film.

Story kicks off as Lee Majors and bride Barbara Hershey come to live with Majors' uncle Lee J. Cobb, while Yaphet Kotto comes home to murder bestial cop Arch Johnson. Roscoe Lee Browne is town's Negro funeral director, the title character who seeks a divorce (the liberation) from unfaithful wife Lola Falana. Her lover is Anthony Zerbe, Johnson's police buddy.

The well-structured plot [from the novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones by Jesse Hill Ford] finds lawyer Cobb trying to avoid an open-court revelation that a white married cop is a Negro woman's lover."

That is the entire review. After reading it again I should probably restate my initial assessment above. The plot is twisted and complicated and quite good, adapted well from Ford's novel, but the characters themselves never receive the up close and personal human exploration that we need. Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey might be the dullest characters of any film, using a few scenes and lines here and there to be the liberal conscience that Lee Majors character lacks. What you miss from this review is the interaction of all the characters. The most complex and revelatory characters from this film are Cobb, Kotto, and Browne. As the funeral director Browne is stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to divorce his unfaithful wife. As a black man, he has every right to divorce his wife; however, even Cobb does not take kindly to the notion of exposing a civil servant (the cheating police officer) as an interracial infidel. Browne ultimately takes a stand to the backwards police department and his wife's lover, a stand that he had always hoped someone might make in their small Tennessee town. And what happens? He is shot in the back and disembowled. The same police officer who partners with Browne's wife's lover is the crooked cop who beat a young 13-year-old boy (Kotto) many year ago. Kotto returns to town on the same train as Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey, and soon enough he has the crooked cop in his sights in an isolated hay field. But he cannot pull the trigger. It is a strong statement about the contrasting moralities of both races. Sterling Silliphant, one and the same from In the Heat of the Night, gives Kotto few lines of dialogue. The actor himself has a stoic and quiet anger that comes across from the opening scene, his own score of catchy R&B sounds his arrival in each scene. Ultimately Lee Majors failure to bring Browne's killers to justice forces Kotto to take action on his own, on behalf of the African-American community that will find no redemption in the law. Rather than shooting Browne's killer, the same officer who brutally beat him as a young boy, Kotto pushes him into the hay bailer and we watch his horrifiying death. Director William Wyler, "Funny Girl" and other mainstream films, presents perhaps the most graphic scene put in a film up to 1970.  

We leave The Liberation of L.B. Jones on a train. The same characters that arrived earlier in the week are on board again. We have two forms of justice. The quiet protest of Majors and Hershey to Cobb's active indifference to racial justice takes them away. The violent and vengeful response of Kotto brings him certain fugitive status.  Are they both right? Are they both wrong? 

The film itself was poorly reviewed and failed to make money. The KKK made anonymous complaints about the content. How do we know it was them? Ask the New York Times Review from 1970. African-Americans applauded the film's content. There are several clips on black film websites and reviews that praise the innovation and boldness of the picture. In the same sense, the review from the NY Times and TV Guide, as well as an article on William Wyler suggest that white audiences and critics were appauled by the film's blunt commentary. But more importantly, people were shocked that there was no white hero to tidy things up in the end. I very much look forward to comparing this to my other films. Until then...

White Trash/La Joven

I watched Luis Bunuel's White Trash this afternoon, and I thought it was a marvelous movie. It has an alternate title, "La Joven," which means "the young girl" in Italian.  The film is set on a beautiful coastal game preserve, and in the opening scene we are introduced to Traver, who we learn via flashback is a jazz clarinetist accused of raping a woman in the nearest mainland town.  Bruised from fleeing across the waters in a johnboat, Traver quickly learns that he is not alone on this island. Miller, the stoic and rugged game warden, is hunting rabbit in a nearby thicket. The camera then follows the brute back to his shanty lodge where we meet "la joven," a young nymphet named Evie. In a series of believable but coincidental events, we learn that Evie's grandfather and fellow warden, Pee Wee, has passed away the night before in the shanty next to Miller's. Pee Wee had been caring for his granddaughter. Before Miller can decide what to do with Evie, she emerges cleaned and groomed at dinner. The unkempt child is revealed as a beautiful young girl. Miller, isolated from humanity, is reluctantly smitten. He makes a thwarted advance on the girl, no more than 13 or 14.

When Miller goes in to town the next day, Traver emerges to steal food and supplies to repair his weary vessel. He and Evie form an immediate bond. She is intrigued by his skin color but disarmed by his gentle nature and generosity (he gives her $20 for a shotgun and gasoline). When Miller returns to find his shotgun and gasoline gone, a manhunt ensues. This is where the plot thickens. Miller believes he kills Traver, and the disgruntled fugitive, very much alive, returns to the lodge to take his revenge. But he does not... there is something about the hostility and hatred that Miller directs towards the unwelcomed guest that elicits pity in Traver. This begins a fascinating exchange in which Traver explains that Miller, a white trash alien, is no better than a black man. And after taking both of the warden's guns, Traver is the man in power. They eventually decide after a tortured existence of a daylong stand off that it serves everyone well for Traver to be on his way off the island. But a storm strikes in the night... in many ways. Miller is consumed by his desire and, as Traver sleeps in the next cabin, forces himself on Evie. Somehow in this storm a local minister and boat captain that Miller has sought out in town the day before manage to arrive on the island to collect Evie. When they arrive, the captain has news of a black rapist on the loose. Traver has anticipated this unwelcome revelation and flees before Miller realizes the accusation’s significance. Another manhunt ensues, while Miller warns Evie that she must not speak a word of her newfound womanhood.  But when pressed by the Reverend about her time on the island, she slips up and reveals Miller's sin. This is where the story adds a layer. Up until this point it is a story about relationships and power. Miller over Evie. Miller vs. Traver. Traver over Miller. But the Reverend's arrival adds an element of religion. It is no longer a race or power issue but a matter of good and evil. How do these men know the accusation of rape to be true? How can one man, a pedophile, pursue another man in the name of morality?

When Miller and the Boat Captain capture a wounded Traver, it takes Evie's bravery to save him from a certain lynching. Then, and this is perhaps the movie's greatest flaw and yet perhaps its most brilliant moment: In order to save himself from persecution at the hands of the law, Miller agrees to let Traver go to save himself from condemnation. The reverend chooses, what he feels, is the lesser of two evils. It isn't exactly a trade, but the way the exchange between the Reverend and Miller goes, this is what it boils down to. The reverend even leaves the possibility of marriage between the wayward warden and la joven. The boat captain, who has expressed his own hatred and contempt for blacks, will not let this fly. He chases down Traver as he makes for his boat and a brawl ensues. In the end, Traver wields a knife that could kill the Captain, but he lets him flee in shame. The final scene jumps from Evie and the Reverend escaping the island on the boat to Miller aiding Traver in pushing his boat off of the shore.  I know this is a lot to take in, but I am fascinated by the plot, the symbolism, and the implications for race relations. For the first time in any of our films, the rationalization of racism is confronted with a Christian criticism. A remarkable web of power exchanges between pedophile, black man, child, and spiritual leader mark a story layered in symbolism and sin.  In an interview about his very Southern film, Italian director Luis Bunuel remarked that he wanted to make a movie that showed the compromises of power-- Bunuel poses a question about the end of the film: does spiritual compromise and the implication of power as a human tool leave us thinking about race? He's right to ask. At the film's end I was not thinking about race, but about evil and goodness and sin and justice.  These are spiritual and philosophical issues, but most importantly, human issues. The audience becomes colorblind in the end without even realizing it-- we witness the motivations and emotions of each character as a human being-- not as a child or a black man or a minister. Very powerful. 

Race Relations in the Rural South

I did not get to watching White Trash today. I decided instead to spend a solid afternoon reading about the American South.  Black, White and Southern describes the chronology of race relations from the tail end of the Great Depression to the present. I doubt that I will get past the early 1970s.  In my reading today, I came across an excerpt about the transition African-Americans made from rural to urban areas in the American South. I thought this was particularly timely considering that White Trash is about a jazz singer from the North who winds up stranded on a coastal South Carolina island. His time on the island is extended based on circumstances, and I could not help but think (in anticipation as I have not seen the movie yet) about the reversal from reality to the screen. In the 1950s and 1960s, while the typical white Southerner was moving from rural and urban areas to the newly branded suburbia (sometimes in the North). African-Americans were moving from rural to primarily urban settings. As the Deep South reduced its agricultural output during the post-WWI economic upturn, increases in industry and service industries (and many menial labor jobs) brought African-Americans to urban areas.  This influx triggered the famous "White Flight" movement, in which white Southerners moved outside of cities to new suburbs. Essentially, the segregation that the Civil Rights Era fought to break down was occurring on a macroscopic and microscopic scale. Not surprisingly, the areas where both races coexisted with modest integration was in rural farming communities where tenant farmers and whites worked in adjacent fields. This was evident in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Tom Robinson and the villainous Ewell family live in close proximity. Black Like Me deals with a series of communities where blacks and whites coexist as co-workers and inhabitants of the same professional, urban, space; but by night, there is total segregation. As I read about the conscious efforts by both blacks and whites to maintain separate communities and living spaces during the 1940s, 1950s, and into the late 1960s, I could not help but pose a question for myself: Did the Civil Rights Era seek integration and equality? Or did it seek only equality? What I mean, and I am not trying to be confusing or controversial, is to ask whether separate but equal was what the Civil Rights Era really wanted? And I mean truly separate but equal. A world where blacks and whites have the same rights and neither race can oppress the other through legal or political means. Is this not, to an extent, the world of the American South today? As African and white Americans, and as Southerners, I continue to see a world of segregation. I am sorry to be so provocative and philosophical, and I hope these questions and opinions do not offend my readers. I promise I will watch White Trash tomorrow and get back to commentary.  Until then...

So far so goodish...

Dr. Revels asked that I give a kind of update blog on my experience and progress. I must admit that thus far my project has not gone exactly as I had hoped it would. I am a little disappointed in the lack of literature on these films. I have "dug deep" on the library's website, consulting databases and looking into archives for magazines and journals with the hopes that I might find some obscure articles, reviews, or criticisms of these films within the African-American community. But most of my success has come from turning page after page on Google. And the pages are endless.  For now I have focused on watching the films, reading what reviews I can, and making use of resources like a Sidney Poitier biography and a few essays written by prominent African-American film scholars and some other interesting, though likely less reliable, commentaries on these films.

As far as my enjoyment goes, I have found that after four films, I am constantly and even subconsciously comparing the depictions of race relations between the films. I am particularly struck by the endings of the first three films I viewed.  Sidney Poitier is placed in a position of acceptance and understanding in both of his films. In Defiant Ones, he cradles Joe Jackson and sings a gospel spiritual in an act of self-sacrifice and freedom from prejudice, while in Heat he boards a train with a tacit moment of understanding and acceptance between his character, Tibbs, and the white police chief.  These images of acceptance and understanding are powerful, and they move away from the mode of white heroism that we find in Mockingbird; furthermore, I am constantly challenged by this same issue from that film. Is Atticus Finch a sugarcoated advocate for civil rights, or he is a very realistic depiction of what a courageous white Southerner would face in 1932? I am still not sure.  I enjoy the way these films challenge me. I have found my reading on the realities of the American South in Black, White, and Southern to be a bit challenging. It is difficult to piece together statistics and descriptions of the transition from rural to urban living with a meaningful application to these films. The book is less about race relations, specifically, and more about the emergence of the Civil Rights era (which is certainly important for race relations).  Nonetheless, I think it is a resource that enhances my understanding and insights into these films in a way that I may not fully appreciate until I have viewed them all and reflected, comparing reality to film more precisely. I enjoy writing the blog. I know that my thoughts and "insights" are not particularly entertaining, but I do hope that what I write is something that can be read with ease and modest appreciation.

My two other texts, Framing the South and Hollywood's Image of the South have been modestly helpful. Each book contains excerpts on the films I have watched, but beyond these few pages, the breadth of information is more than my already general subject matter can handle. Tomorrow I will watch White Trash, a film about a jazz musician who finds himself on a rural, desolate, but nonetheless segregated island in the South Carolina low country. An Italian director made it in the 1950s. Until then...

Black Like Me

I watched Black Like Me today. The film is based on the essays and memoirs of journalist John Howard Griffin, who in 1960 underwent a dramatic dermatological makeover in order to change his skin color from white to black. The middle-aged husband and father then spent 6 weeks moving through the Deep South pretending to be a black man, all the while writing about his experiences in articles for Ebony and other magazines. Ultimately the experience and articles would be turned into a book, which in 1964 was made into a film. The movie version of the memoirs received little critical success in 1964, and since that time has become an obscure but important marker of the 1960s race relations culture.  It is not surprising that the film was not received with great fanfare. James Whitmore (who plays Brooks in Shawshank Redemption) portrays Griffin with a straightforward but nonetheless inspired attempt to recreate the frustration and discussion that Griffin felt after countless episodes of prejudicial treatment.

The film itself lacks a plot. We move from one scene to the next. There are several exchanges between Whitmore and white motorists who give him rides from town to town. All but one motorist inquires about some form of black sexuality, and these are sequences, while perhaps exaggerated slightly for viewing-value, which Griffin describes candidly in his memoirs.  Much bigotry and fear directed at blacks up through the Civil Rights Era regarded their apparent overt and animalistic sexuality. Griffin becomes consumed with anger over the ignorance and indifference many whites, including those who will not offer to help when he is chased by young hooligans through the streets of Hattiesburg, MS, show towards a polite, well-spoken, educated black man. The movie reveals that blacks only have a negative attitude towards Griffin when he reveals his identity to a young civil rights activist and his father near the movie's end. But this film's significance is not about the lack of plot, nor the way in which the movie's makers ignored the temptation to dramatize the events of Griffin's memoirs for the sake of flow. The film isn't really about the countless ways in which whites mistreated a man they assumed to be black. This film is a bridge. While we can only judge the creative thought processes behind movies like Mockingbird and Defiant Ones, if we take this film as a mostly honest depiction of the experiences of a "black" man traveling through the American South, then we can view the potential for film's power.

In 1964 this film portrayed the realities of the Civil Rights Era in the South with candor and grit. This movie holds no punches. It is far more telling of the realities in the American South during the Civil Rights Era than any of the other film we have discussed this far and yet... you cannot purchase it for less than $40 on Amazon.com. It is obscure and hard to find on the Internet. It made no money when it was released and gained little attention from the American public. Perhaps, this is because the film is not very good. It is well acted in parts but views more as a documentary in others. There is no climax. There is no hero. There is no justice served. It is a bitter depiction of what was going on during that era. The story itself is remarkable, and the book Black Like Me garnered much attention for Griffin when it was published. Yet somehow the film was not even a flop. It was a never seen never heard of movie that only now gains recognition as ahead of its time. Perhaps again it is an all too familiar tale of white heroism. Griffin is a white man highlighting the plight of African-Americans. In reality and through his writing he is revered, but there is something about this film-- the visual image of a white man pretending to be a black man and wading through a limbo of racial identity, the psychology of the ordeal that we see in his very blue and tired eyes, that overshadows the events themselves. At the movie's end we are more concerned with Griffin's struggle to stay sane as he loses his identity, to make peace with his persecution, that we are consumed with the semblance of plot and character in this film and distracted from its ultimate accomplishment: presenting the purist depiction of racial relations in American cinema that was, perhaps, ever made. It's a shame we lose that in a mediocre film. I will leave with this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of American Film:

"Students might find Black Like Me very useful as a snapshot of a point in time, and explore how things have changed in the years since the setting of the movie. It could be used in many ways by students wishing to gain an understanding of the roots of the civil rights movement and of the many levels of discrimination faced by black citizens in the American South in the late 1950s. The film could be viewed on different levels, appealing to both a white and black audience and studied for the different gradations of racism. It could even be useful to consider subtle points, such as language. Are phrases such as “you people” actually code words for racism?"  


It was unintentional, but I could not help but notice the use of words "could" and "might". These are things this film could do, but it remains in obscurity.